1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a passenger conveyor such as an escalator or a motor driver passenger walkway, a moving handrail for the passenger conveyor and a method of manufacturing the same.
2. Prior Art
Passenger conveyors such as an escalator, unavoidably are contaminated due to contact of hands of the passengers with the handrails and contact of the handrails with handrail driving means. To cope with this problem, Japanese Utility Model Unexamined Publication No. 48-87786, proposes sticking a tape to the surface of a moving handrail over the entire length thereof with the tape being removable and exchanged for a new tape at suitable time intervals.
The above conventional technique, however, is not applicable in practice as yet to passenger conveyors of the type in which the moving handrail is driven by being pinched by a plurality of rollers, since it is necessary to frequently exchange the tape due to the fact that the contamination is pressed and stuck on the tape by the pinching pressure of the rollers.
In a conventional chain driver moving handrail 4 such as shown in FIG. 17 and disclosed in Japanese Utility Model Unexamined Publication No. 57-169768 a rubber surface hand contact decorative member 8 is disposed over a core material 7 including a core cord on which the longitudinal tension is applied, laminated sailcloth 6 being horseshoe shaped and interposed between the decorative member 8 and the core material. In manufacturing a moving handrail 4, the core material 7 of the core cord is first placed on the laminated sailcloth 6 which is beforehand laminated and formed into the horseshoe shape, and the rubber surface decorative member 8 is then put on the top layer of the laminated sailcloth 6, and the entire assembly is subsequently pressed for the preliminary forming and is finally subjected to the press vulcanization, thereby manufacturing the moving handrail 4. The handrail 4 is moved in engagement with a guide rail 33 and driven in general by being wound on a pulley (not shown) or by being pinched by rollers (not shown).
Since the conventional handrail of the above structure is obtained after subjecting the rubber surface decorative member 8, the core material 7 of the core cord and the sailcloth 6 to the forming and the press vulcanization, a considerably long time period is required for the manufacturing thereof.
The moving handrail 4 is an endless belt member driven by the rotary frictional force of the driving rollers provided in the lower portion of the balustrade while being guided in a sliding contact manner by the guide rail provided around the outer periphery of the balustrade. Therefore, the moving handrail 4 repeatedly receives mechanical stress while it is being driven such as tensile stress, folding stress, forward bending stress, backward bending stress and friction stress, resulting in the problem of high travelling resistance. Further, the moving handrail is subject to contamination not only from the hands of the passengers but also by contact with the driving rollers.